SEO Monitoring (v1)
The Ranking Page Nobody Meant To Change.
ChangeTower loads your ranking pages as often as every 5 minutes and emails you when the title, canonical, robots tag, H1 or copy changes.
✓ No credit card · First monitor live in 5 minutes
Every page here is under a monitor. ChangeTower loads it on your schedule, as often as every 5 minutes, stores a dated snapshot every check, and emails you when your criteria are met. It reads the page and the HTML behind it, and never looks anything up in a search engine.
The screenshot ChangeTower stored on that check: the page as a visitor saw it, kept alongside the HTML and never edited.
Detection is content-level. ChangeTower reads the words and the HTML the page serves, where the title tag, the canonical and the robots directive live. The screenshot is a dated record, not compared against anything.
One folder for the pages that earn the traffic, plus the competitor pages above them. Open a row to see what changed and how the page looked that day.
A deploy touches forty things. Name the four you care about.
A ranking page changes constantly and almost none of it matters. Name the handful that decides how the page is read, and only those changes reach you.
Criteria in your own words.
No rules engine, no severity matrix. Say what deserves to interrupt your day, and the monitor holds to that.
One rule, written once. Two ordinary edits archived quietly; the 11:20 title tag change reaches you on the check that finds it.
Catch it on staging, before it reaches the ranking page.
The change you catch on staging costs nothing. The same change live, found six weeks later in a report, is the expensive one. Record the steps to that staging page once.
Record the steps once. They run before every check.
Sign in to staging, accept the banner, pick the region, open the template. You record it once and the monitor repeats it.
The template on staging, checked on the same schedule as the page it is about to replace.
From the title tag alert to the fix live the same afternoon.
Explore how ChangeTower improves SEO change control.
Every monitored page captured on schedule. 3 changes since yesterday, 2 archived.
The canonical link stopped pointing at this page and now points at the desk-choosing guide. Nothing on the visible page changed.
Summary: The title tag changed from the descriptive line naming the guide to a generic template default, with the brand moved to the front. The H1, the body copy and the canonical are unchanged. Matched your rule.
Sent the moment the 11:20 check found it. ChangeTower reports what changed on the page: it does not track rankings, crawl your site, or know what this page ranks for.
The title tag changed from a 58 character line naming the guide to a generic template default, with the brand suffix moved to the front. The H1, the body copy and the canonical are untouched. Nothing a reader can see is different, which is why the capture below looks entirely normal.
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The capture looks exactly like yesterday's, because a title tag is not on the page. It is stored anyway: the record is page and HTML together.
Every check in between has a snapshot too, changed or not. The title tag was identical in all 3,880 checks before this one. So the question is not whether something changed this morning, but which deploy, and nobody has to guess the date.
Turn the cadence up on the twenty pages that earn most of the traffic, and down on the rest. Every setting is per monitor.
Reading the page that outranks you? Monitor it from there.
You find these pages in a tab late in the afternoon, and lose the URL by the time you are back at your desk. The extension turns that tab into a monitor.
From open tab to monitored page, in one click.
The page above you will not stay as it is. Watching it tells you when it was expanded, restructured or retitled.
Fourteen sections and a comparison table. Rewritten in June, and it has gained a section roughly every three weeks since.
Covers sizing, height, load rating, materials, cable management, warranty and delivery.
Every section ends with a summary box and a link to the relevant range.
Found in a tab, monitored before it closes. Next time that guide gains a section, you hear about it instead of noticing a quarter later.
Everything a page says about itself.
Twenty pages earn most of the traffic and deserve a check every few minutes. The other four hundred can wait for daily. Frequency is per page, as often as every 5 minutes.
Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
The two lines a search result is built from, and the two most likely to be quietly rewritten by a template, a plugin or a well-meaning CMS edit.
every 5 minCanonical Tags
Watched for a canonical that stops pointing at its own page, points at another, or disappears. None of it changes anything a reader can see.
every 5 minRobots & Indexing Directives
The robots meta tag on the page itself: noindex, nofollow, none. Watched for one appearing where there was none, the expensive kind of accident.
every 5 minH1s & Heading Structure
The H1 and the hierarchy under it, watched for a rewrite, a demotion to H2, or a template change that leaves two H1s or none.
every 5 minBody Content On Ranking Pages
The words that earned the position. Watched for sections cut, paragraphs added, a rewrite that halves the page or an editor trimming it for length.
hourlyInternal Links & Anchor Text
Links out of a page and the words they sit on, watched for links dropped in a redesign, anchor text flattened to "read more", or a hub page losing half its links.
dailyStructured Data, Hreflang & Social Meta
The JSON-LD block, the hreflang set and the Open Graph tags the page serves, watched for a block dropped in a deploy or language links that no longer agree.
dailyError States & Failed Loads
A page that starts returning an error, or stops loading at all, shows up on the check that finds it, alongside the pages still fine. This is a change signal, not an availability guarantee.
every 5 minCompetitor Ranking Pages
The pages above yours, watched the same way and with the same summaries: a guide expanded, a title rewritten, schema added, a page restructured.
dailyWhere this earns its place.
Catch the deploy nobody wrote down
Templates, plugins and CMS defaults change title tags, canonicals and robots directives far more often than people do. None of it reaches a release note, because nobody knew.
Know the day a page went noindex, not the quarter
A page that drops out of the index looks fine to everyone who opens it. The first real signal is usually a report weeks later. A check every few minutes makes it an email that afternoon.
See what the page above you changed
When something moves, the useful question is whether it was you or them. Watching the pages that outrank yours tells you when a guide was expanded, retitled or restructured, and summarizes what.
Have the before-and-after before anyone asks
Every check stores a dated snapshot, changed or not, so the awkward meeting starts with a record, not a theory: what the page said, what it says now, and the check where it changed.
Cover every client's ranking pages, not just the loud ones
Agencies and consultants answer for sites they do not deploy and cannot see into. Give each client their own folder, and add their ranking pages and competitor equivalents in one go with bulk setup.
Show a client what changed, and when, without a crawl
A crawl tells you what a site looks like today, not what it looked like on the Tuesday before the drop. Dated snapshots, stored exactly as captured and never edited, can.
Covering a portfolio rather than one site? Bulk setup adds a list of URLs in one pass.
It watches the page. It does not watch the ranking.
Worth knowing before you start: this belongs next to the rest of your SEO stack, not instead of it.
Every change a page makes to itself
ChangeTower loads the pages you name, as often as every 5 minutes, and reads what came back: the content on the screen and the HTML behind it, head tags included. If the page serves it, a change is caught on the check that finds it, seen or not.
- Title tags and meta descriptions rewritten, truncated or emptied
- Canonicals that move, self-reference or vanish
- A robots directive appearing: noindex, nofollow, none
- H1s rewritten and heading structure reshuffled by a template
- Body copy, section count and internal links moving on a ranking page
- Structured data, hreflang and social meta added, changed or dropped
- All of the same on any competitor page you point it at
- A dated snapshot of every check, changed or not
Rankings, crawls and traffic
ChangeTower watches the pages you name, one page per monitor, and never looks anything up in a search engine. It cannot see what a page ranks for, who links to it, how many people reached it or how fast it loaded. It reports the change with a timestamp. What that change did is the part you have people for.
- Keyword rankings and SERP positions
- Backlinks, referring domains and link authority
- Traffic, sessions, clicks or impressions
- Site-wide crawls, audits or technical SEO scores
- Core Web Vitals, page speed and rendering budget
- robots.txt, sitemap.xml and other standalone files
- Finding pages you never told it to watch
The honest version: your rank tracker tells you the position moved. This tells you what changed on the page, and on which morning, the question it leaves you holding.
For ranking pages, turn these on.
Four of these do most of the work. The other two decide how you hear about it.
AI Monitoring
Alert criteria in your own words: "alert me when the title tag, the canonical or the robots tag changes, or when the H1 is rewritten." Every change gets a plain-language summary, and only the ones matching your rule reach you.
Explore →Keyword Monitoring
Watch for a specific string appearing or disappearing: the phrase a page is built around, a noindex directive, a schema type, a disclaimer that must stay in the body. The alert names the string, not just the page.
Explore →Selective Monitoring
Point the monitor at the article body and the head, and leave out the related-posts rail, the review count and the "recently viewed" strip. Otherwise the page changes on almost every check and the one that matters gets buried.
Explore →Manual User Actions
Staging sites sit behind a sign-in, and plenty of templates only render after a region picker or a "show more". Record those steps once and ChangeTower replays them before every check.
Explore →Scheduled Checks
Set frequency per page: as often as every 5 minutes on the twenty pages that carry the traffic, daily on the long tail, and daily on competitor pages that rarely move but matter when they do.
Explore →Email Notifications
The alert lands in your inbox with the summary, naming the tag that changed and what it changed to. Nothing to install, nothing else to watch.
Explore →The questions people ask before they start.
How does SEO change monitoring work?
You add the pages that earn your traffic and ChangeTower loads each one on the schedule you set, reading the title, canonical, robots directive, H1 and body copy every time. When one of them changes you get an email naming exactly what moved, with a dated snapshot behind it.
Is ChangeTower a rank tracker?
No. ChangeTower never looks anything up in a search engine, so it has no idea what a page ranks for, whether that moved, or who sits above it. For positions you need a rank tracker. This is not one.
It does the other half of that job. A rank tracker tells you a page moved. This tells you what changed on it, and on which morning, the question you are left holding after that.
Does it crawl my site and find the pages for me?
No. One monitor watches one page, and only the pages you name. There is no site-wide sweep, no crawl budget and no discovery step, so a page nobody added is not watched at all. Worth knowing before you start.
Most teams do not want four hundred pages alerting anyway. The twenty or thirty that carry the traffic are worth checking every few minutes, and bulk setup adds them as a list, not one at a time.
Can it watch our robots.txt or our sitemap?
Those are files, not pages, and ChangeTower does not monitor standalone files as their own targets. So no, not those two.
It matters less than it sounds: the directives that cause most of the damage sit on the pages themselves. A robots meta tag saying noindex, a canonical pointing at the wrong place, an hreflang set that no longer agrees: all part of the HTML the page serves, and all watched.
Will it tell me why our traffic dropped?
No, and anything claiming to would be guessing. ChangeTower cannot see your traffic or your rankings, and has no opinion about cause.
It removes the part of the investigation that usually cannot be done at all: establishing what changed on the page, and when. Six weeks of "did anything change on this page?" answered from an unbroken record, not memory and a deploy log.
How quickly will I hear that a title tag or canonical changed?
The alert goes out on the check that finds the change. So: as fast as the cadence you set, and checks run as often as every 5 minutes. A title tag rewritten at 11:18 reaches your inbox around 11:21.
The other side, plainly: a change made and reverted between two checks passes unseen, because there was nothing different to find when the monitor looked.
Will I get an alert every time we publish something?
Not if you write criteria, which is what makes this usable on a site your own team edits all day. Say what you want to hear about, such as "alert me when the title tag, the canonical or the robots tag changes, or when the H1 is rewritten", and the AI reads every change against it.
A new paragraph, an updated byline or a reshuffled related-posts rail is read, classified and archived without an alert. The record stays complete; the alerts stay rare enough to read.
Can it watch our staging site before a change ships?
Yes, and it is the cheapest place to catch any of this. Record the sign-in with the steps that run before each check, and the monitor reaches the staging page the way you would. Credentials are stored securely and used only to reach it.
Run the staging template and the live page as two monitors: when they stop agreeing, you find out before the change reaches anyone. The exception is a site that blocks automated access outright. Then the page will not load, and you see that straight away.
Can I watch just part of a page, such as the title and canonical?
Yes, and on a ranking page you usually should. Selective monitoring watches the parts that carry the meaning, the head and the article body, and leaves out the related-posts rail, the review count and the "recently viewed" strip.
Without it, a busy template changes on nearly every check and the one you care about arrives buried in forty you do not. Keyword monitoring does the same job from the other direction: watch one string appearing or disappearing, and ignore the rest.
Can I monitor competitor pages for SEO changes the same way?
Yes. A monitor does not care whose page it is, so the guide above yours gets the same checks, summaries and dated snapshots. Daily is usually enough: those pages change on an editorial calendar, not a deploy pipeline.
That answers the question that comes up every time something moves: was it you or them. It tells you nothing about their traffic or their positions, because it cannot see either.
What is a snapshot, and how long is it kept?
A dated capture of the page: the rendered page and the HTML behind it, head tags included, stored every time a scheduled check runs, changed or not. Each one carries a precise timestamp and stays retrievable.
The "changed or not" part is what makes it useful. A head tag change is invisible in a screenshot, so the value is the unbroken series: the title tag was this on every check up to 11:15, and something else from 11:20 onward.
Where do SEO alerts get sent?
Email, Slack or Microsoft Teams. Alert rules decide what reaches you, so a canonical or robots change lands immediately while a reshuffled related-posts rail is archived quietly.
Can it monitor pages behind a login or on staging?
Yes. Record the steps to reach the page once, including the sign-in, and ChangeTower replays them before every check, which is how staging pages get watched before a change ships.
How is this different from a site audit or a rank tracker?
An audit tells you the state of the site the day it ran, and a rank tracker tells you the position moved without saying why. ChangeTower watches the page itself and names the change and the day it happened.
Find out on the deploy, not in the quarterly.
Put the pages that earn the traffic under a monitor, and add the competitor pages above them.